Word 2002 For Dummies and Excel 2002 For Dummies (both available in Barnes & Noble)

Weird1-thing-to-do Dept.: Since it's usually not good to buy books (which get lost or in the way), to assist in looking through them in the store, the program below can be used in such as a TI-86 calculator, and runs like this:

Page number? 67

Percent = 32

(It is necessary to edit the total number of pages in the book, in the second line down.)
This allows for breaks, in looking through the book, and gives a road map of the progress through it. In addition, "waypoints" can be observed (from the simplest "rational"2 numbers):
17% = 1/6, 20% = 1/5, 25% = 1/4, 33% = 1/3, 50% = 1/2, 67% = 2/3, 75% = 3/4, 80% = 4/5, 83% = 5/6
A similar thing (learning simple waypoints) can be done in reading temperatures in Celsius (which is SI -- in the Metric System, which is used exclusively by MIT's magazine Technology Review) -- human body temperature is 37, water freezes at 0 and boils at 100 at sea level, and Fahrenheit equals Celsius at -40.

1 "Weird" in Shakespeare's time was a noun that meant "fate" or "destiny", and the "weird sisters" in Macbeth referred to the Fates (3 women of Greco-Roman myth who controlled the destiny of each person) -- the term was also extended to include women who prophesied or possessed other attributes of the Fates.
2 There are basically three types of numbers:
-- "rational" numbers are those such as 1 or 1/2 (ratios of whole numbers)
-- "irrational" numbers are those such as 2½ (which can be written in terms of a finite number of operations on whole numbers)
-- "transcendental" numbers are those such as "e" (2.7 +), "pi" (3.1 +), or trigonometric functions, which are computed with the use of "infinite series" (which keep adding or subtracting "terms" to the result, until the desired accuracy is reached)